Go big, Birmingham, or go back to your pathetic homes. Go nuts, if you want to be something other than a shocking third-world hellhole.

Can that be us? Really?

It's a shock and a shudder to be sure, a rude alarm when the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia -- a city known for its drug cartels, mayhem and murder -- tours your town and says ...

"What I saw today was one of the most depressed areas I have ever seen."

Ouch.

It's like the mayor of Chernobyl begging you to clean up your act, like the mayor of Mogadishu asking, "Why can't you all just get along?"

But maybe, after the recoil and the resistance, it's time to wake up and smell this Colombian's coffee.

Former Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa rode through some of this city's most blighted areas this week -- though not its most blighted areas -- and came away shocked.

Shocked!

And this is a guy who ran Bogota, a place once besieged by car bombs and kidnappings, terrorized by drug criminals and killers. This is a guy who has seen the world.

Birmingham blight

Penalosa, after biking through Titusville and Elyton, said Birmingham must do something on a colossal scale to exorcise its squalor. It should buy out the poor people and build a city of small towers in Titusville not far west of UAB. Pepper it with parks and paths and people of all description.

Lure in the rich, he said, because "rich people are good for poor people."

Do something "crazy."

There is, in Birmingham, some mad appeal to crazy. We are, after all, just two years removed from Larry Let's-Do-Something Langford.

A canal from Birmingport through downtown Birmingham? Sure.

The Trevi Fountain and the 2020 Olympic Games? Been there, scoffed at that.

Birmingham has been Crazytown. And that makes us a little leery of embracing our inner insanity.

Besides, the doubters would say, Bogota is no Nirvana.

While it is true that city was reborn in recent years, it has since experienced its share of chaos and corruption. As The New York Times wrote, some of its accomplishments have been "eclipsed by outrage."

So we might need to take Penalosa's perspective with a big grain of salt.

But that doesn't mean his assessment of Birmingham was not dead right.

Perhaps his first impressions were a little rushed, and perhaps his off-the-cuff ideas for buying up huge swaths of poor Birmingham neighborhoods were pretty far out there. But the idea behind those wild and crazy notions is exactly what Birmingham needs to hear.

Birmingham needs to do something radical.

Crazy, shocking, insane.

But it's not just about real estate or roads, slums or slogans. We the people of Birmingham need to radically change the way we think, and the way we see our city.

We need to see ourselves as others see us. We need to look for solutions rather than excuses. We need to be bold enough to confront the many things that are wrong in this community, and smart enough to enhance those many things that are right.

We need to look at the most depressed areas of our town and ask more, for once, than "what is the quickest way out of here and how do we make it quicker?"

We need to change. Radically. But we need to start by radically changing the way we think. And the way we think of what is possible.